


The Way We Live Now

by zlot



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-17
Updated: 2011-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-23 20:09:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/254416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zlot/pseuds/zlot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He always says that, that he thinks she’s all right. He does. He’s also pretty sure she wouldn’t tell him if she weren’t." An AU inspired by "The Girl Who Waited," in which the older Amy is the one to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Way We Live Now

She wakes up in the TARDIS. For a disoriented moment, it could have all been a dream, the whole 36 years — the console room so familiar, right down to the awful grating of the floor. And Rory’s face, anxious and searching and so young.

But this is still her, breastplate and back pain, the nagging discomfort a 22-year-old knows nothing about.

Rory’d saved her, then. He must have carried her away from the handbots, but she’s not in his arms now. He hovers beside her, solicitously. Bedside manner. Not sure how she’d like to be touched.

“Where is she?” she asks, her voice flat, but she knows. Only her now.

\--

Rory knows they won’t stay. Amy won’t even look at the Doctor, directs her clipped responses to the air next to his head. She doesn’t ask to leave — she doesn’t, _won’t_ , ask for much. Wouldn’t ask Rory to make so much as a cup of tea for her, though she’ll still accept one, right enough. It seems ridiculous to imagine her begging for a trip somewhere fantastic, like the old Amy used to do.

So Rory takes care of it, speaks to the Doctor, which is terrible. The Doctor’s mouth continues to smile and talk even when his eyes have gone small and miserable, and Rory, acutely tuned as ever to the pain of others, can neither handle it nor look away. In any case he couldn’t stop listening to the steady stream of inane cheerfulness the Doctor is attacking him with.

“Of course! The two of you, loads of catching up to do, I expect, don’t need old gooseberry Doctor hanging around.”

The Doctor starts puttering about, looking for his toolbox, scratching the side of his face like he does. “About time I was on my own again, too — lovely times, but all good things, eh?”

Rory mumbles assent, watching the Doctor fix things on the console that don’t need fixing.

When he tells Amy, she accepts it as readily as she would any cup of tea, without comment. But an hour later, she finds him and says, without preamble, “Not Leadworth. My parents.”

He really hadn’t thought of it, and probably it’s obvious, because she gives him a half-smile that seems almost pitying. “It won’t be the same for you.”

“Mustn’t grumble,” Rory replies, forcing some cheer into his voice. “We can go wherever we like. It will be an adventure.”

In the end, the Doctor takes them to a town in Scotland, where Amy hasn’t lived since she was a little girl. “Is it all right?” he asks them, subdued and older than ever.

“A parting gift to Amelia,” Amy says, neither hostile nor friendly.

“It’s fine,” Rory adds.

Amy marches off the TARDIS, bag in hand, and doesn’t look back. Rory lingers a moment, stares about the room, before giving in and wrapping both arms around the Doctor’s too-thin shoulders. The Doctor grips him back. Despite all best efforts, a few tears get squeezed out of his stupid eyes onto stupid tweed. The Doctor prudently doesn’t mention it.

“Take care of our girl, Roranicus,” he finally says, as Rory breaks away with a decisive _hrrmph_ , and nods, and picks up his bag, and leaves.

\-- 

Amy is nervy, at first, in open places.

She spends much of the first days in their new house. It’s bigger than the old one, the one they ended up spending so little time in. Rory had received a winning lottery ticket in the mail. He sputtered about it for a while, but Amy honestly doesn’t mind a little compensation from that man. “A few extra cushions,” she told him, “will not go amiss.” So they live in comfort, and there’s no immediate worry about jobs.

Rory goes out and buys new things to fill up the rooms. She stays within, aware always of her position relative to the door, the wall behind her back, noises from outside. Rory doesn’t want weapons in the house, but she digs his cricket bat out of the shed. She keeps it by her and hides it when he’s home. There’s nothing to use it on, it just keeps her calm.

She opens the boxes that contain their old life, a time so long gone that it seems like a dream. The first things to go are the Doctor dolls and drawings.

She puzzles over the giant box of nail varnish — bottles upon bottles, some in ridiculous colors she can’t believe she ever wore, even in another life. She tries to paint her nails again, selects a positively absurd lime green for the purpose, but the knack is gone. She painstakingly removes the gummed-up evidence before Rory comes home, and the bottles are tossed out as rubbish, too.

Guiltily she tucks away photographs of herself — the old-young Amy she and Rory killed between them. But a photograph of Rory, solo, dressed as a centurion at a fancy dress, gets stuck up on the fridge, and he laughs when he comes in the back door and sees it grinning at him, and Amy hears.

\-- 

Much remains the same. He had always loved Amy’s unpredictability, and now when he goes in for a hug he never knows whether he’ll find a kitchen knife tucked into a waistband. He always pulls out the ones he finds, over her protests. “I get enough blood at the hospital, thanks,” he insists. “Zero interest in treating a waiter for multiple stab wounds because he makes the mistake of tapping you on the shoulder.”

But occasionally an edged weapon slips by, and it keeps his life interesting.

He’d always loved the rare moments when she relied on him, and those moments are more frequent now. She doesn’t easily remember all the social routines, how to make small talk with neighbors or calculate a tip.

Sometimes, later, she’ll accuse him of enjoying her moments of helplessness. “I’d forgotten how smug your nose can look,” she grumbles, after Rory successfully navigates an automated checkout system at Sainsbury’s.

“Did you enjoy protecting me from the handbots?” he inquires.

Her face stays sullen for a moment, and then: the little smile, his favorite. “Yes.”

“You handle the swordplay,” Rory says, reaching for her hand. “I can go to the bank.”

(He remembers her loopy signature on their wedding certificate, how she took her time over all the vowels. Amelia Jessica Pond. Now she carves a quick “A. Pond” into receipts, the ballpoint nearly ripping the paper.)

\--

She’s pretty sure she’s caught him, once or twice, on the phone with the Doctor. But she doesn’t ask.

He makes cupcakes on Melody-Mels-River’s birthday and sticks a candle in one, lets it melt onto the frosting. She’s pretty sure she hears sniffles from the bathroom that day.

He hasn’t had as much time as she has, and she doesn’t know quite how to comfort him. Emotions were never her best thing, and it’s not easy to substitute legs and sass for them anymore. She is 59 goddamn years old.

\--

Rory remembers how, when they were younger, Amy would slink around in his favorite outfits and drape her hair next to his face and whisper innocuous things far too close to his ear. It was wonderful, because he tended to be a bit shy, even after the wedding; it helped that she would initiate things, spell out her desire for him like a skywriter.

(A desire that, then and now, left him feeling mildly bewildered. Like he was the victim of the world’s longest, worst/best practical joke.)

He would never, in all his life, forget Amy on their wedding night, stepping out of her white dress and onto the ladder of the bunk bed that would live in infamy. Translucent skin and intent eyes and all his favorite freckles.

Amy doesn’t flirt as much in public now. She’s sensitive to how others look at them, to any juxtaposition of the words “May” and “December.” She once snapped at sales clerk who asked if Rory was her son, snarling, “I’m a month younger, _actually_.”

And she doesn’t like to wander around the house naked anymore, like she did when they moved into their first house — crowing, “I can’t do _this_ in the TARDIS! Or maybe I will. See the look on raggedy man’s face.”

The new Amy likes the lights off, but that’s the main difference. Once it’s dark, she’s there. Her body is both familiar and strange by turns. He discovers once again, and with the same bewilderment — not that he’d _ever_ ask questions, uh, during — how much she wants him. Still.

He pities any man who has never had anyone so strong in his arms.

\--

When Rory is able to resume his medical studies, again thanks to the Doctor’s well-meaning patronage, he’s so busy that it gives Amy an excuse to go exploring. She leaves him, at first for a few weeks at a time, then for a few months.

The day she got used to being out in the open again was the day she stopped wanting to be indoors, ever. She wanders the highlands, and then strikes out beyond. She doesn’t tell Rory where she’s going, but dutifully carries the little Nokia he likes her to have just in case.

She doesn’t tell him that she modified it like her old one. Sometimes she calls it a probe and sometimes a screwdriver, depending on her mood.

\--

Amy is 64 when Rory, now 28, becomes Dr. Williams. “This means you’re going to grow a ponytail, right?” Amy asks after he graduates. She rarely mentions their days in the TARDIS that casually. It makes him laugh.

That night he calls the Doctor after Amy’s asleep. The Doctor doesn’t always pick up, and they never really found out for sure whether he knows he has an answer phone. But Rory leaves messages anyway, short ones.

“Hellooooo. It’s me. Rory. Williams. Right. You probably know that. Anyway, just wanted to let you know I’m a doctor now too. Lowercase, though. Thought you’d like to know. Yeah… hope you’re still alive.”

He pauses.

“Love to River, if you see her. And Amy’s all right, I think.”

He always says that, that he _thinks_ she’s all right. He does. He’s also pretty sure she wouldn’t tell him if she weren’t.

\--

Her hair lightens. “Strawberry blonde,” he calls her.

“It’s how gingers go grey. I’m going grey. You can’t jolly me into not knowing that,” she says, flicking his arm.

“Uh, I can _try_.”

\--

They don’t celebrate her birthdays, but when she hits 69 she disappears for her longest trip yet — eight months away.

From New Zealand she calls him at ridiculous times. Mostly he’s so tired from work that they just listen to each other breathe into their phones.

“Ponytail yet?”

He huffs a quick laugh. “Not yet. But I’m letting my beard come back in. Makes me look more mature.”

Amy doesn’t laugh, but he knows she’s smiling. He almost wishes the connection would crackle a little. She doesn’t feel far away. She could be calling him from just down the road.

\--

He always asks her when she’s coming back, and she can tell that he really hopes it’s soon. And that’s enough to make her buy the return tickets, for now.

She knows one day she won’t come home. That there are things she won’t let him do for her. Change her nappies, buy her a Zimmer frame. Even if it doesn’t come to that — well. She doesn’t ever want his hands to roam over her body looking for disease instead of a feel.

So one day, she’ll go and stay gone. She plans for it, scopes out destinations, saves money to a bank account he doesn’t know she has. Composes a farewell note in her head. Knows she’ll never get it right.

There was a time she would have worried about him. She doesn’t now. He might even go back for one last fling in the TARDIS. And she’s very aware how long that last fling could last. A billion places to go, and the Doctor’s terribly lonely. Amy gets that now, at least.

But for now, her legs bear her up and her eyes are cloudless. Her hair isn’t as red as it was, but it still bounces. She misses his stupid face.

She calls him and he answers: “Amy?” Hospital noises bustle around him, and he sounds tired, but glad.

“Oi,” she says. “I’m coming home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title lifted with all good will from Anthony Trollope, mostly because I've always liked how it sounds.


End file.
